Through a Novel, a Window to an Author’s Beliefs

Oscar Hijuelos speaking at the Books & Books store in Coral Gables, Fla., in 2010. He died in October at 62.Credit
Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

Nearly 20 years ago, when he was three books into an acclaimed literary career, Oscar Hijuelos delivered the manuscript of his new novel to his editor. It was a Christmas tale filled with the joy Mr. Hijuelos had always taken in with the trappings of yuletide, from manger scenes to oratorios to evergreens strung with lights.

From a lesser writer, perhaps, the new novel would have been perfectly fine. From one who had already won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” who had received fellowships and honorary doctorates and a dinner invitation to the White House, it felt lacking.

At least it did to Mr. Hijuelos’s editor at HarperCollins, Robert S. Jones. He rejected the book, telling its author something cryptically critical along the lines of, “This is not what I had in mind for you to write.”

The evening after receiving the verdict, Mr. Hijuelos and his girlfriend at the time, Lori Carlson, sat together in their living room in Upper Manhattan, depression suffusing the air. Finally, Mr. Hijuelos told Ms. Carlson, “O.K., I’m really going to the heart of Christmas then.”

Mr. Hijuelos headed into his home office the next morning and started to work. Some of his writing days ended with his elbows bloody from hours of toiling at the desk. Ultimately, however, he produced what is surely one of the most fully achieved novels about religion, “Mr. Ives’ Christmas.”

It is, in distillate, the Book of Job transposed to Morningside Heights in the late 20th century. The title character, Edward Ives, is a commercial artist possessed of what he calls “a small, if imperfect, spiritual gift.” That gift finds expression in part through Mr. Ives’s son, Robert, who aspires to enter the priesthood.

So when Robert is shot dead outside his parish church a few days before Christmas 1967, the victim of a teenage thug without any particular motive, Mr. Ives is plunged into an abyss of suffering and doubt. For decades afterward, he mourns without cessation, withdraws from his beloved wife, scratches his skin bloody at night. Until, by forgiving his son’s murderer, he receives grace and redemption.

In any nativity season, “Mr. Ives’ Christmas” would deserve to be read for its enormous artistry and insight. In this particular one, the novel serves as a piercing reminder of what was lost when Mr. Hijuelos died in October at the age of 62. A memorial service for him will take place at 7 p.m. Monday at Riverside Church, just blocks from the stretch of Claremont Avenue where most of “Mr. Ives’ Christmas” is set.

Because of the vast popularity of “Mambo Kings,” which was made into a film, Mr. Hijuelos was sometimes perceived as a poet of appetites — the music, food and sex that pervade his best-known novel. That misapprehension obscured the religious faith and struggle that informed his art.

In his memoir, “Thoughts Without Cigarettes,” Mr. Hijuelos referred to “my closet religiosity.” Despite a nearly fatal bout of kidney disease as a child, he wrote, “I truly believed that His presence was as certain as the air I breathed.” Even amid the counterculture of the 1960s, he cherished Christmas celebrations with his best friend’s family.

That believer’s sensibility struck Ms. Carlson, who married Mr. Hijuelos in 1998, from their very first encounters.

“People didn’t understand the depth to which Oscar went to that place he believed was the place of faith,” she said in an interview last week. “He was not just spiritual but religious. On our first date, we talked about faith — what we believed about God, about afterlife.”

“Mr. Ives’ Christmas,” though, was not merely a celebration of faith. It was a parable of faith tested by tragedy. When Mr. Hijuelos finished the manuscript, which Ms. Carlson had been reading and editing as it progressed, he told her one of its wellsprings.

“The root of that novel was a real story,” she said. “When Oscar was growing up in his neighborhood, one of the families that was very close to his family lost their boy. He was shot. And it was a senseless, tragic, horrific murder, and Oscar never forgot it. And the dignity of the family and the way they dealt with it stayed with him.”

Another essential moment in the novel takes place when Edward Ives, strolling through Midtown Manhattan on an ordinary day, experiences a rapture: “the very sky filled with four rushing, swirling winds, each defined by a different-colored powder like strange Asian spices.”

It is the image that Mr. Ives comes to doubt yet also depend upon in the aftermath of his son’s murder. And it is an image that Mr. Hijuelos himself saw, according to his longtime friend and fellow writer Philip Graham.

“I remember having a number of conversations with him about the vision,” Mr. Graham said last week. “He said this event had happened, it had in his adult life, and he didn’t know what to do with it. And this book is an answer to the question, ‘What do you do when you’ve been given a vision?’”

During most Christmases, Mr. Hijuelos and Ms. Carlson-Hijuelos delighted in bedecking their tree with hundreds of ornaments collected during their travels — this one from Kuala Lumpur, that one from Harrods in London, when Ringo Starr stood nearby them in the cashier’s line.

Yet Oscar Hijuelos said something, in an interview on the literary blog Ninth Letter not long before his death, that might bring his widow some of the solace that Mr. Ives eventually found. “Nothing will ever quite capture the human inner voice and the spirit,” Mr. Hijuelos said, “the way that books do.”

Email: sgf1@columbia.edu

Twitter: @SamuelGFreedman

A version of this article appears in print on November 30, 2013, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Through a Novel, a Window to an Author’s Beliefs. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe